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The Cea Forum 2021 Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 William Blake’s Emoji: Composite Art and Composition Matthew Leporati College of Mount Saint Vincent “If you look closely at the letter C,” I explained to the class as I zoomed in on the title of William Blake’s poem “The Chimney Sweeper” on the projector screen, “you can see that inside the letter, there’s a child hunched over with his cleaning tools.” I paused for a moment and gestured toward the figure as I circled it with the laptop’s cursor. “Blake forces us to question the distinction between text and image. It’s a letter, but it’s also a picture.” “So it’s like an emoji,” one student laughed from the other side of the room. Several others nodded in agreement. I was teaching William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience in my freshman writing class, Writing in Context I at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, and we were examining “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence (Figure 1).1 This poem famously highlights the injustice of child labor in the eighteenth century and indirectly condemns the Church of England for tacitly supporting the exploitation of children by offering to the poor a message of conformity to the social order. Like most of Blake’s poems, the Songs were the product of his unique methods of printing: an engraver by trade, Blake wrote, illustrated, engraved, printed, colored, and sold his works with the help only of his wife, Catherine.2 The results of this process are what W.J.T. Mitchell has called “composite art,” a marriage of text and 69 www.cea-web.org Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 image working complexly in tandem to produce meaning.3 Text and image cannot be fully separated in Blake’s works, as they comment upon and modify each other’s significance. Figure 1. The title of William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” (Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Copy L).4 Chimney sweeps appear in the letter C and above the letter P. My student’s comparison of Blake’s art to emoji reminds us of the extent to which college-aged adults employ and confront images in textual communication each day.5 Emoji are ideograms and pictographs used in electronic messaging, most commonly text messages and private messages through apps such as Twitter or Snapchat. As the descendant of the “emoticon” – such as a smiley face created with a colon and a close parenthesis – emoji include facial expressions, but they also encompass animals, objects, types of weather, food, symbols, and more. They have also been used in advertisements and magazine articles, and Oxford Dictionaries selected an emoji as the 2015 “word of the year,” noting that “emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”6 Growing numbers of people, especially college students, are increasingly using such images in daily communications.7 When composition and literature 70 www.cea-web.org Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 classes ignore the centrality of images in much of today’s communications, they pass up an opportunity to prompt students to examine their own regular engagement in a kind of modern composite art. In the class period described above, I encouraged my students to think through how Blake’s incorporation of images into his texts resembles and differs from our own. Our insights developed over several class periods and ultimately prompted me to generate a series of assignments that interrogate the relationship between image and text. In what follows, I examine how Blake’s composite art anticipates our contemporary blending of image and text through emoji. Showing how this aspect of Blake’s work can be brought into classroom discussions, I explore how studying Blake’s poetry can help students think critically about the function of emoji and other images in the written word beyond the classroom. The final section of this article provides an example of a series of writing assignments that prompts students to reflect on the intersection of image and text in Blake’s work and in their own lives. A Meeting of Meanings: Blake’s Composite Art and Emoji The nature of Blake’s composite art renders incomplete any study of his poems based only on their words. In Mitchell’s formulation, Blake’s work contains an “energetic rivalry, a dialogue or dialectic between vigorously independent modes of expression” (4). As such, image and text interact to produce meanings on nearly every plate. Rarely subordinated to his poetry as straightforward illustrations, Blake’s designs relate to his text in a variety of ways. As Mitchell details, Blake sometimes presents images that refuse to illustrate the poetry, inviting readers to 71 www.cea-web.org Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 imagine their own poem to complement the image. In other instances, Blake’s designs provide a counterpoint to an image in the poetry, such as his illustration of Orc’s fiery, energetic speech in America with an angel, and a passage about angels with Orc. In such instances, image and text serve as foils of one another, and readers are encouraged to consider the relays between apparently antithetical concepts. At still other times, Blake engages in “syncopation,” a term Mitchell borrows from Northrop Frye, in which the image is separated from the passage it seems to illustrate. Ultimately, Blake’s composite art “embodies the drama of a divided, polarized consciousness seeking reunification – the subject of his prophetic books” (Mitchell 52). Blake invites his readers to perform the imaginative work of unifying these elements, thereby discovering new meanings and insights that neither the image nor the poetry contains on its own. Many times, Blake’s designs suggest meanings that compete with or even diametrically oppose those suggested by the words of his poetry. Often, they cast the poetry in new light, and vice versa. Blake’s illustrations function in many ways like emoji in contemporary communications. Both can emphasize, develop, transform, and in some cases contest the text with which they are paired. As Marcel Danesi’s Semiotics of the Emoji has indicated, emoji indeed have a “semantic system,” one that is “intrinsically connotative and, some might say, even poetically so to a degree.” Using the heart-shaped eyes emoji ( ) as an example, Danesi compares its function to literary symbolism: “When found within a text, it instantly compels one to process it as if it were a visual-poetic symbol.” It not only “encodes an immediate object (happiness ensuing from romance), but dynamical objects, such as the feelings associated with ‘heart-felt’ romance 72 www.cea-web.org Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 through the poetic form in which it is presented” (59-60). Drawing on numerous studies, Danesi documents several common functions of emoji, including phatic, emotive, conative (“emoji with strong emotional content”), referential (“concrete referents”), and poetic (103).8 Often emoji serve the function of framing a message with the author’s tone, frequently used in positions where punctuation would be placed. But “Beyond their enhancement of tone, emoji can act as an emotional coping strategy and a novel form of creative expression, even if, in both cases, they are constrained by pragmatic-textual conventions” (99). I would suggest that in their capacity of enabling creative expression, emoji offer rich opportunities for people to generate their own version of digital “composite art.” Like Blake’s images, emoji can reinforce meanings present in a text but also generate new meanings. An example of the power of Blake’s composite art comes from his most anthologized poem, “The Tyger.” Beholding the titular animal, the speaker wonders what sort of Creator could produce such a ferocious creature.9 Running just beneath the surface of the poem is the challenge of theodicy: how could evil exist in a world supposedly produced by a benevolent God? Would not a Creator who allows evil to exist be evil himself – or at least be too weak to prevent it from occurring? Or might some other creator or demiurge lurk behind the world’s evil? The poem’s staccato rhythm and multiplication of questions (without answers) underline the speaker’s uncertainty in the face of these doubts: And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, 73 www.cea-web.org Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! (ll. 9-16)10 Yet the image of the tiger that appears in the lower right corner of the plate (Figure 2) queries this attitude of doubt. Far from the “fearful” creature interrogated by the speaker, the titular animal appears docile and smiling, almost like a toy. One way to read this contradiction is to conclude that the image reveals a limitation in the perspective of the speaker. The tiger may not actually be an evil beast forged by a malevolent creator; instead, the speaker’s pessimistic attitude, a result of his state of Experience, causes him to misperceive reality. The image therefore reframes the poem’s message: perhaps Blake is suggesting that evil is less an objective feature of the world than an error of perception. The image thus causes readers to question their initial reading of the poem, and it opens new avenues of interpretation that would not exist in the words of the text alone. 74 www.cea-web.org Winter/Spring THE CEA FORUM 2021 Figure 2.
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